The great baseball player Hank Aaron once said he spent 23 years in Major League Baseball looking for the same pitch every at-bat: the breaking ball. “I never worried about the fastball,” he continued. “They couldn’t throw it past me.”

Everyone loves a winner – except when one just kicked your ass or unless the losers are loveable and ballgames are incidental to binge drinking and voracious making-out in the bleachers of Wrigley Field.
But winning is why Yankees’ caps and Lakers’ jerseys predominate everywhere and make Astros gear in ATX look scarce by comparison.

“In Texas, a lot of the first baseball games were played in pastures where sheep or cattle kept the grass at a playable level.” What a sound and evocative starting point in author Clay Coppedge’s swift account of America’s Pastime in the People’s Republic.

Round Rock’s Dell Diamond has staged a lot of Pastime over 12 broiling seasons of Round Rock Express baseball. A small town’s worth of hot-shot prospects, scuffling and rehabbing Major Leaguers and Crash Davis’ have kicked up Dell’s dirt, but none (aside from Roger Clemens) have been as accomplished and mythologized as Sacramento RiverCat Manny Ramirez.